
ottimizza le prestazioni del tuo PC
Net.Medic è un programma cosiddetto Browser Companion. Lavora
come monitor di sistema, per la connessione Internet, Intranet ed è in
grado di analizzare le performance dell'hardware (CPU e Modem) per isolare
e diagnosticare problemi di configurazione e di velocità.
Net.Medic lascia all'utente la possibilità di individuare
eventuali colli di bottiglia e risolvere i problemi relativi, siano essi causati
dall'Intranet, dal proprio PC, da Internet, dal Modem, dall'ISP, dal backbone.
Net.Medic identifica i problemi in pochi secondi ed offre suggerimenti per risolverli.
In alcuni casi, addirittura, li risolve esso stesso. Net.Medic è inoltre una
potente sentinella sul Vs. desktop. E' in grado di
mantenere la memoria dei server più ... lenti .
Optimizing Internet Performance
Restoring
the User's Faith in the Internet
The Explosion in Internet Performance Issues
As has been well-documented
in the past few months, the Internet is plagued by a number of performance
problems, creating the impression that the Internet is slowing to a crawl.
While industry gurus may understand the underlying causes of these problems,
the typical Internet user does not. The result is a growing frustration
on the user's part as well as a proliferation of fingerpointing among the
various Internet service and component providers.
The slow crawl of
information, exacerbated by rapid growth in daily traffic on the Internet,
can be attributed to a number of problems, including:
- Misconfigured desktops or modems
- Bandwidth bottlenecks
- Page transfers that are "hung"
- Insufficient access to ISP
- Poor phone lines causing modem hangs or sub-par modem throughput
- Congestion on the backbone
- Server sluggishness
- Server oversubscription
To users of the Internet
and corporate intranets today, all of these problems produce the same effect:
a Web page that takes forever to download or a cryptic error message of
little value to the individual unfamiliar with HTTP.
More importantly, users are at a loss to understand the appropriate corrective
measure. Should
they buy faster modems? Not if the problem is an insufficient modem bank
at the ISP. Switch ISPs? Not if the ISP is not the bottleneck. What about
when the page transmission is hung? Waiting longer won't help, but if the
user doesn't know that the cause is a hung connection, the result is an
interminable wait. The frustrating news, from the user's perspective, is
that while these problems have solutions, the user doesn't know how to
implement these solutions. Unfortunately, most of the predictions and proposed
solutions deal only with the issue of bandwidth and congestion on the Internet
itself, leaving the user powerless to improve his Internet performance.
Available bandwidth
(and congestion), however, is just one determinant of the user's online
experience, and often not the most important one. If a modem connection
is slow or if the Web servers are unresponsive, the perceived value of
the Internet diminishes. Users need a tool for proactively monitoring and
managing their online experience so that they receive the value they are
seeking and paying for. They also need a mechanism for speeding up their
data transfer rate by optimizing the individual components along their
personal route defined as the dialogue between the user, the transmission
through his unique pathway to the Web site, and back from the Web site
server. More importantly, users need a way to optimize the interaction
between the components including the CPU, modem, TCP/IP stack, ISP connection,
and Web site.

Personal route through Internet
A further source
of frustration to Internet users is that, given the organic and loosely
organized nature of the Internet, users don't know whom to call or blame in
the event of a problem. Their entire experience is reduced to the limited
performance of the weakest link in their personal route through the Internet.
If users could isolate the source of their problems and hold the responsible
parties accountable, market forces would emerge more easily, with high-quality
providers winning over more customers and thriving in this growing market.
The result would be a more productive and enjoyable experience for the
user as well as a smoother-running, more responsive Internet one which
enables conversations, commerce, and community.
The Solution
VitalSigns Software,
Inc. is committed to enabling users to get the most out of the Internet.
VitalSigns has leveraged its employees' and advisors' years of industry
and academic research to create Internet performance optimizers. Our mission
is to:
- Improve the individual's online experience
- Accelerate the adoption of the Internet as a viable commerce and communications medium through
tangible accountability and performance metrics
- Improve relationships between users and their service providers
- Provide fact-based end-to-end service monitoring
- Isolate performance problems
- Provide actionable information to enable users to make informed decisions
VitalSigns has created
an easy-to-use, inexpensive, and powerful set of tools that empower all
constituents of the Internet and Intranets, including users, service providers,
equipment vendors, and managers.
VitalSigns Software's
first product is an Internet browser companion, called Net.Medic, designed
precisely to speed up and optimize the Internet user's online experience
and the Intranet user's IT experience. The companion works alongside
the user's browser of choice and dynamically tunes the end-to-end performance,
depending on the type of problem encountered from the user's unique
vantage point. It also keeps a log of information regarding problems
encountered that could benefit from a long-term change, such as a modem
upgrade.
The result? A faster,
more rewarding online experienceone where users can focus on their
destination instead of the road that got them there.
Unmet Needs
Providing a rewarding
online experience requires that several user needs, currently unmet, be
fulfilled. These user needs include increasing perceived speed, monitoring
and improving performance, and isolating problems to allow the responsible
party to take corrective action.
The Need for Speed
What Internet users
crave, above all, is increased responsiveness or, in another word, speed.
A recent survey by Georgia Tech Universityi shows that speed
is the number one concern of Web users.
Typically, in a
user's personal route there are numerous autonomous components and service
providers whose performance can affect the speed of transmission to that
user. These can include the computer, the browser and operating system,
the modem, the ISP, the Internet backbone, and the Web site server and
software. The common denominator between all of these parties is that they
all rely upon a single protocol, or language, known as TCP/IP—the Transmission
Control Protocol/Internet Protocol—whose use has been in existence for
decades.
VitalSigns has developed
numerous optimizations that can be made right at the desktop—including
optimizations for the TCP/IP transmission, the modem, and the desktop hardware—that
in combination can typically boost performance by 50%, sometimes by
significantly more than that. VitalSigns has harnessed the power of
this protocol in its products the first of which is Net.Medic to make these
optimizations available to all users of the Internet.
The Need for Monitoring and Improving
To date, Internet performance
has been monitored largely by those who provision the Internet—the Internet
Service Providers and the operators of the Internet backbone, such as MCI.
These vendors, working under extremely competitive conditions, have tools
available to them which monitor, in high detail, the activity of the equipment
they control. But these tools, such as probes and sniffers, do not diagnose
problems outside of the specific domain of the equipment owner. While they
are excellent tools for monitoring the portion of the Internet under their
control, they don't report on problems upstream or downstream. They are
also too expensive to provide to multiple end users, even if they were
able to diagnose personal route problems. Other tools, such as "ping" and
"traceroute," ii are handy but cumbersome to use and very difficult
to interpret. Moreover, Webmasters of the Web sites typically monitor only
the health of their own servers, not that of the Internet itself.
As a result, users
with complaints either get an incomplete report of the contributing sources
of their problem, or worse, they get the run-around from vendor to vendor.
While this level of service is unthinkable elsewhere in the consumer's
experience, because the Internet is new and technical, the Internet user
feels both overwhelmed and helpless, a situation he or she wants to change.
The agent for educating
and empowering the Internet consumer exists within the Internet itself;
it simply needs to be unlocked. Through VitalSigns' unique uses of the
rich instrumentation capabilities of the lingua franca of the Internet TCP/IP Internet
users can diagnose and pinpoint what and where their problems are. In addition,
VitalSigns' knowledge engine allows these users to correct a variety of
client/server application transmission problems. VitalSigns employs an
exhaustive list of client/server monitoring and correction algorithms in
its architecture based upon years of research. This architecture is so
unique that VitalSigns has a number of patents pending on it.
If Internet users
have a mechanism for monitoring and documenting their ISP's performance,
ISPs can provide proof of various levels of service. Armed with Net.Medic's
competitive information, ISPs have a mechanism for provisioning tiered
service and pricing levels and billing for them. The users of these tiered
services can verify delivery, resulting in higher revenues and improved
customer satisfaction for the ISP. The analogous situation holds true for
corporate Intranets and the IS groups who manage them.
Hence, service-level
or application-level monitoring is easily achievable with VitalSigns' technology.
The management of the IS group, as well as the users of its services, know
how well their service is being delivered, where any problems are, and
how to quickly resolve them. Finger-pointing is reduced, efficiency is
enhanced and customer satisfaction rises.
The Need for Problem Isolation
Today, when a browser
fails to return a page or response time degrades, the user has no understanding
of which component in his path caused his problem. Unable to identify the
source of the problem, he is frustrated and inefficient in seeking help
from others and often blames the wrong party for his troubles. He may cumulatively
spend hours with the ISP or PC vendor helpdesk or his corporate IT helpdesk,
wasting his time and theirs.
VitalSigns's Net.Medic
software can isolate the source of the problem and apply the appropriate
algorithm to fix the problem automatically where possible.iii
It can also generate reports which show the location and frequency of these
problems.
In the Internet,
Net.Medic can isolate problems to segments within clear points of demarcation,
such as the demarcation between the ISP and the Internet backbone.iv
This informs the user who has ultimate authority over a particular problem
and its solution.
Some ISPs have erroneously
blamed the Internet backbone for an ISP congestion problem, because their
users don't see where the congestion problems occur and ISPs are not, consequently,
compelled to fix congestion problems under their control. Similarly, responsive
ISPs, who readily fix problems they control, have no mechanism for making
fixes or improvements readily apparent to their customers, because some
other component in their customers' personal route may degrade overall
performance.
With Net.Medic,
Internet users can cost-effectively isolate problems to a particular segment
of their personal route. They can therefore hold their ISPs accountable
for ISP-related problems. Hence, a customer-oriented ISP would promptly
fix a congestion problem under its control and would be able to tout its
customer service track record.
Similarly, a user
would not spend his precious time with the support hotline of his ISP if
he knew that the problems were elsewhere—and not caused by the ISP. In
the process, both the user and the ISP would save time and expense.
Net.Medic can also
define the demarcation points within the Intranet. Thus, if a corporate-wide
IS (Information Systems) group is responsible for the backbone, and a business
unit is responsible for its own local area network (LAN), and a systems
administrators' group is responsible for desktops or servers, the user
can immediately contact the correct organization in the event of a failure
that is beyond the reach of Net.Medic's optimization capabilities.
How Net.Medic Improves
User's Experiences
There are three types
of actions Net.Medic takes to correct personal route problems: automatable,
manual, and long-term actions.
-
Immediate, automatable
actions are transparent to the user so that he knows his connection
is optimized. These actions dynamically tune the personal route for optimal
performance in response to real-time, changing conditions, much like microprocessors
on high-performance cars change engine and suspension tuning in real-time
today.
-
Manual actions
such as certain desktop reconfigurations can be done by the user, and are
easily explained and understood by the user. VitalSigns' knowledge
engine provides a step-by-step guide in plain language for fixing numerous
problems that the user might encounter.
-
Long-term actions
are typically equipment purchases, and are based on the knowledge that
the purchase will yield improved performance. Since changes such as switching
ISPs or upgrading modems cannot be automated and require action on the
part of users, they need sufficient information to feel confident in embarking
upon the change. Net.Medic makes recommendations based on exhaustive reporting
of problems encountered and their frequency.
Conclusion
As the Internet and
its uses continue to evolve, the need for performance optimization, problem
isolation, and service-level monitoring will only grow. Similarly, as corporations
further rely on their intranet infrastructure for mission-critical business
applications, requirements for performance improvement and measurement
will escalate.
VitalSigns was founded
with the mission of creating an easy-to-use and inexpensive set of tools
that empower all constituents of the Internet and Intranets, including
users, service providers, equipment vendors and managers. This goal is
achieved by unlocking the potential in instrumenting the Internet's own
protocol—available for the first time with VitalSigns' Net.Medic.
Net.Medic's ability
to perceptibly improve speed, monitor and improve performance, and isolate
problems, creates an environment of accountability in which users are likelier
to accelerate their use of the Internet and of Intranets.
By building on years
of research in this field, VitalSigns is committed to providing these tools
and helping to achieve the promise of an IT infrastructure that can measurably
deliver on its promises—communications, community, and commerce.
"What are
the main problems with using the Web?"
Speed continues
to be the number one problem of Web users (76.55%), and has been since
the Fourth Survey when the question was first introduced. This is not to
say that problem has been getting worse, as the number who complained of
speed is down from 80.9% in the Fifth Survey, but still higher than the
69.9% in the Fourth. This effect is most likely due to the changes in connect
speed of users to the Internet. The next big problems are "finding known
info" (34.09%), organizing collected information (31.03%), and being able
to find pages already visited (13.41%). Cost does not seem to be an issue,
with only 7.75% reporting this as a problem. Given that the
average household
income of Web users is well above the normal population, this is not very
surprising and can not be taken to mean that the Web is currently affordable
for all. The only notable difference between genders was the problem of
finding information: 31.01% of males, and 40.33% of females reported this
problem. This difference was found in the Fifth Survey as well.
Any Information? Please contact Italsel Telephone 051-320409
Fax 051-320449 or Mail us at
ITALSEL.COM
i Copyright 1994, 1995,
1996 Georgia Tech Research Corporation. All rights reserved. Source: GVU's
WWW User Survey www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys.
ii A UNIX and Windows95/NT
command
iii Clearly, some catastrophic
problems—such as the failure of an Internet router or switch—cannot be
fixed by the user.
iv The notion of demarcation
has long been part of telecommunications, providing clear lines of responsibility
between Interexchange Carriers (IXCs) and Local Exchange Carriers (LECs).
© 1997 VitalSigns Software, Inc.
VitalSigns, Net.Medic and AutoCure are trademarks of VitalSigns Software,
Inc. All other products mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners.